One More Week For My Fantasy Draft

This coming Saturday....July 31.....I will be hosting my work's 2005 Fantasy Football Draft.  Eighteen rounds of pure guesswork with stops for food, drink, [a quick phone call to the wives] and watching football highlights from a year ago.

Everyone will be flanked with various fantasy football publications that all contain the "magic nuggets of knowledge" that guide us thru the draft.  We all have those "sleepers" underlined, highlighted or jotted down somewhere so that we can overvalue them and pick them when no one wanted him anyways.  The smack has been going on for a while...but especially since July 20 when everyone had to announce their keepers [we each get to keep 3 players from last year's team...although they all have to play a different position]. 

People have been jotting down mock drafts....even dogging it so people either think they are going one way when they are really going another [I know I am guilty of hyping up guys I have no intention of drafting]. 

Weird...since I had never intended to be in a fantasy league...let alone run one.  I always figured these were unathletic geezers who are just armchair quarterbacks that never played the game.  Turns out I was wrong.  Yeah, there are those guys....but my league is made up of people who just can't play football anymore.  Some played in high school, some played a ton as a kid.  Mostly, we got too old and out of shape that we just can't go out there and play it anymore.  So, fantasy football....really, fantasy sports....have taken that competitive space.

We are just a little 8-team league.  The draft will be at my house with little fan fare.  No squirreling up in hotel rooms....or hotel ballrooms.  No coming into work on the weekend and having a draft in the breakroom.  No holding the draft at Hooters or something.  It will be a 14-week season with a 3-team playoff...culminating in our "Super Bowl".

Actually, this year I am using AOL's fantasy manager service.  And, no...not because it is AOL [I had been using Yahoo], but because after doing the research and finding out what my league needed....AOL offered it. 

Which brings me to this:  Mottrams, G-Coztanza, DieCast, Monponsett, TreeSoup, Trickage, Erin, BlackNGold, Quick Slants, LionsDen, Dungy, Pre-Jockularity, or whomever from the Pigskin bloggers wants to get in.....we should start an AOL fantasy league if someone wants to arrange it.  It would be run to rock one with the AOL's finest football bloggers.  Ya know...just to throw an idea out there.

Anyway....God I cannot wait for football to get here!!!!!  Baseball is wigging me out.